That has shifted interest among Linux desktop proponents toward netbooks based on the alternative ARM processor. Popular with smartphones, ARM chips are cheaper and use less power than Intel Corp.'s Atom processor for netbooks.

And Xandros Inc., whose Linux distribution was used in the original Asus Eee netbook, has already done so.

But Novell Inc. said no, for now. Markus Rex, acting senior vice president and general manager for open platform solutions at Novell, told Computerworld on Monday: "There certainly is a lot of hype around ARM-based netbooks, [but] at the moment, we don't do anything on ARM-based devices."

"Linux runs just fine on ARM," Rex said. "But we decided to focus on a couple of opportunities that are in the pipeline now."

Novell's SUSE Linux appears to be one of the more popular versions of the open-source operating system for netbooks.

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